Katt Got Your Tongue
by Groundis
Summary: It was the most dangerous mission I've ever carried out. And damn, was it fun.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1 | Login()

Fara hates it whenever I remind her that I make more money than she does. Sure, she might run a system-wide corporation that supplies ships, tanks, and arms to every branch of the Cornerian military, but there's only so much money to be made above the table. What she doesn't know is just how much sweeter the deal gets when you peek into some of the shadier areas of Lylat. Is what I always do, strictly speaking, "legal?" Not by a long shot! Is it fun? It's a hell of a lot more fun than Pointy Ears back on Corneria has signing paperwork all day, I can tell you that.

When you live in a world where everyone is walking around with a dozen computers strapped to their bodies, the person who understands those computers is king. Or, queen, in my case. I might have started out humbly, but Katt Monroe is nothing if not crafty. A few years after I ditched the Hot Rodders, I had every major corporation, crime syndicate, and government in Lylat begging me for my technology. I built and sold servers, networks, secure communication tunnels, you name it. In turn though, I've also constructed my fair share of viruses, backdoors, and other less-than-desirable pieces of software and hardware.

When you work solo like I do, risk doesn't seem to matter as much anymore. I mean, worst case scenario, you die. Then what? Nobody else gets compromised, nobody else gets hurt. I know a certain avian would probably slap me for saying that, but he doesn't have any moral ground to stand on, flying into the heart of a dogfight like he has a death wish. But regardless, working alone means I've taken on a substantial number of hacks and invasions that, put simply, I probably should have died carrying out.

What can I say? The pay was good, and the challenge was even better.

One excursion in particular though soars high above the others as the most dangerous and risky operation I've ever pulled. It was stupid, and I've still got a few scars to show for it. I wear them proudly. They're a badge of honor for pulling off the impossible. And, believe it or not, Radar Dish herself was the one who sent me on it. Fara still apologizes whenever I bring that mission back up with her over coffee, but I always wave away her concerns. She needed the best, so she hired the best.

It was a remarkably beautiful day in Corneria City on the afternoon I picked to infiltrate Artec Industries for Fara. The sun was twinkling high in the air, a stray ray of light managing to slip past the towering buildings around me and sparkle across the ripples of a bubbling fountain. I took a deep breath, holding it buried in my lungs and feeling it fill my chest before expelling it back out. The air smelled positively delightful, with tones of lavender and the scents of a nearby bakery swirling in my nose. People were bustling all around me. They poured in and out of the compact subway entrance with their briefcases in one hand and their phone in the other. If it were any other day, I would've stayed there basking in the sun, just enjoying the scenery.

But the temptation of an operation that would test the limits of my abilities was too much. I smiled just a little as I looked up the facade of the building in front of me. It was solid, sweeping blue glass, interwoven with an irregular web of dull metal beams and blinking red lights. Five massive letters were printed on the front of the skyscraper, enormous enough to stretch up nearly a mile into the air and yet still be perfectly visible from the concrete below.

 _ARTEC_

I felt the pressure of a smile creeping onto my lips, butterflies flitting in my stomach, my fists balling up at my side. This would be fun. I looked down, smoothing out the wrinkles in the blazer I was wearing with one hand. There was always a well-pressed suit and a spotless dress handy back at my studio, just for occasions like this where I had to blend into a more sophisticated crowd than I was accustomed to. I reached one hand up, readjusting the pink tie around my neck. It was showtime.

The broad doors swung wide open on their hinges as I strode inside, a blast of cool air tousling my hair when I passed over the threshold into the lobby. The space was cavernous, filled with nothing but dazzling sunlight and fresh air for hundreds of feet above me. The floor underfoot was pure white marble, flecked with dark patches of black. An escalator accelerated upwards along one wall, depositing its riders up onto the main section of the lobby. I stepped aboard it, feeling the ground beneath me rumble. Another short breath escaped my lips as I leaned back onto the railing. The rest of the plaza unfolded over the lip of the stairs while I climbed, revealing an even larger space with buisnesspeople coming and going, and several seating areas with a few people typing on their keyboards and scribbling on holopads. This was where the action began.

The casual smile melted off my lips, leaving behind a small, concentrated frown. One misstep, and I'd either end up detained, or dead. I scanned across the entire room. My eyes flicked from person to person, seat to seat. I did my best not to concentrate on the guards posted in every corner, sporting radios in their ears and sunglasses across their eyes, with blasters surely concealed beneath their jackets. Normally a guard or two wasn't a problem to subdue, but Artec had a nasty reputation for training its guards to protect the company tooth and nail. I blinked back my nerves, instead continuing to glance around the lobby. My ears perked up when I finally spotted what I needed, my tail flicking happily behind me. An isolated group of chairs were pushed together in a tight circle at the far end of the room, each of them barren - save one. I strode over confidently, shouldering my backpack and weaving through the busy foot traffic, my eyes fixed on the lone wolfess sitting in the circle, absorbed in typing away at her keyboard and giggling whenever she saw a new funny picture, presumably. I'm sure that I rolled my eyes. That was a perfectly good processor, wasted surfing the net for the next humorous image or video instead of doing what it was designed to do: math. Hard, complicated, rewarding math.

I didn't feel bad starting my attack with that ditz.

The lupine's head popped up when I brushed past her, taking a seat in another one of the chairs in the circle. She tugged one of her earphones out as I shrugged my backpack off and started fumbling inside for my laptop.

"Hey there!" the wolfess said. Her words were slurred through a piece of gum she was chewing in the side of her mouth. You have no idea how badly I wanted to let loose a Miyu-sized groan right then, but thankfully I managed to restrain myself to a thin smile and a nod. My laptop slid out of my backpack, its pink case glinting in the bright sun. Unfortunately, that was when I made a sloppy mistake. I winced when a sharp plastic _clunk_ sounded from inside my pack, earning a curious look from the lupine and turning the heads of a few onlookers. Such a rookie mistake, not securing my gear inside its container properly. I needed to be more careful, if I was going to make it through this.

I pretended like nothing had happened, trying to act normal, and thankfully people seemed to buy it. Everyone around me went about their business after a painfully awkward second, all except the lupine who continued to look at me hopefully. I flipped open the lid of my laptop, watching the machine spring to life with just a tap of my fingers. Even now, the sheer power that rests in my hands whenever I'm at a keyboard makes me feel tingly inside. All the knowledge of every scientist to ever live, the ability to solve a differential equation in a single heartbeat, access to every door and every lock in the solar system… It all still makes me just slightly dizzy when I think about it. I'm sure most people would call me a nerd for that, but they'd probably shut up pretty quickly once I got my hands on their browsing history.

Regardless, my laptop's screen flared bright white as it booted up, eventually dimming into pitch black with nothing cluttering the screen but a command line, a list of accessible nodes, and a few executable toys on the side. I glanced back up when I saw everything was working, catching eyes with the wolfess again. My stomach felt nauseous at the idea of trying to carry a conversation with the preppy airhead, but people like her were always the weakest entry point into a network.

I plastered the biggest fake smile I could muster onto my face, beating back a gag when I tilted my head to the side and started talking in my most bubbly voice.

"Well, hi there!" I exclaimed. "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" You have no idea how much mouthwash I had to use after this operation.

The lupine visibly brightened at my words, her tail beating furiously with excitement against her chair. "Oh my gosh, you have no idea," she said, waving her hand once at me. I wanted to rip it off. "Me and a few of my girlfriends are, like, going to go out sunbathing later, it's so gorgeous," she drawled.

"That's an awesome idea! I'll totally have to do that too," I lied through gritted teeth. I realized almost instantly that was as much small talk as I was going to be able to take. It was time to get down to business. "So, I don't think I've ever seen you around here," I said, pulling up a public directory of all the employees at Artec on one side of my screen. "What's your name?"

"Oh, my name's Shirley! What's yours?" she asked, shuffling back up into her chair. I entered the name into the directory, and after a second of thinking, a dozen different employees popped up, each with a different last name. I'd have to do a little more digging if I wanted to get her ID.

"My name's Krystal," I lied. I still laugh whenever I use her name on a mission. Blue was ecstatic the first time I told her that I liked to use her name for my alibi. She must have pranced around for half an hour, proud of the fact that she was wrapped up in so many of my heists and infiltrations.

"Say," I kept going, trying to procure myself a last name to work with, "you're not Shirley Hopewell, are you?" I asked, knowing full well that wasn't a real person. "I keep hearing stories about her, and it would be, like, so funny if that was you," I asked, wanting to vomit when I heard my voice in my own poor ears.

The wolfess pouted a little, shaking her head. "Sorry, my name is Shirley Brown. It's still totally great to meet you though!" she said eagerly. I wasn't listening anymore though. I had everything I needed. I searched her name again, and sure enough, Shirley Brown appeared. If I'm remembering right, I think she was listed as Director of Social Media Outreach. Typical. But none of that was important. What was important was that her Artec username was listed directly underneath an obnoxious photo of her posing with a tube of lip gloss. I almost considered abandoning the mission when I saw her login was _ShirleyGirly_ , but I swallowed the bile in my throat and pressed on.

Now that I had a username, all I needed was a password. Normally that would have been almost impossible to get my hands on, but thankfully, I knew that every Artec terminal kept its password stored in exactly the same location on its hard drive. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be as easy as copying and pasting that location from memory. All their passwords were stored securely in a hash table, so I'd have to reverse engineer what I needed.

First things first though. I wasn't at all surprised when I found the lupine's computer connected to a nearby wireless node. Coupling to her internal router was woefully easy. No security protocols, no blocked ports, I don't think she even had an antivirus running in the background. I didn't feel even the slightest twinge of guilt when I double clicked on the first of my toys, a program that would rip the hashed password I needed from her computer. Everything ran without a hitch, and before the wolfess could even blink, the data was loaded onto the side of my screen. Now, I had to crack the hash function.

I ran the second one of the tools I'd prepared for this occasion, a rainbow table lookup. I crossed my fingers, sticking the hashed password into the program and hitting run. The window sprang to life instantly, as the value was transformed and checked, transformed and checked, hundreds and thousands of times every second. The world around me seemed to fade as I watched the display churn for unending seconds, doing its best to produce the decoded password, but falling short again and again. After a minute of waiting, it became clear that the program would need some help, or I'd be sitting there all night. I knew there had to be some kind of hint, some kind of lead that I was missing.

That's when I saw it.

It was the saving grace of the entire operation, the light at the end of the tunnel, a mulligan in the middle of my dire situation. I'm sure my grin was either dripping with glee or sadism when I spotted a small sticker adhered to the corner of the wolfess' laptop. It was nearly obscured under a thick layer of glitter, but the subject was still clearly visible. There was a small, blazing comet streaking through the sky, complete with cartoonishly angry eyes and a pair of muscle-bound, flexing arms on either side. Underneath the picture was a bold set black letters:

CORNERIA METEOS

Score! Relief bubbled inside me when I saw the advertisement for her favorite sports team, front and center. My hands flew across the keys as soon as my brain made the connection, dumping every keyword I could think of related to the Meteos into the program. Sure enough, my screen flashed bright green in success only a moment later, spitting out the successfully unhashed password for my jubilant self to use however I saw fit - _MeteosMania212_. Oh, and use it I would. Only the promise of even more imminent fun kept me from breaking out into a dance at my successful account theft.

Now that I had that airhead's login information, I could move onto the second phase of the plan, and my personal favorite leg of the infiltration. It was such a beautifully simple exploit, but when it was paired with the firepower of every server I had at my disposal… Let's just say I was a happy kitty when I first dug up this gem.

Essentially, the idea was this: on the Artec system, whenever two different people logged on at the same time with the same username, the mainframe would process the same login request twice. If the actions were spaced out by more than a few milliseconds, the server would just ignore the second input, which is boring and not helpful. It just so happens though, that by entering them at _exactly_ the same time, and this is where you can begin to applaud my genius, the system will get confused, and try to log the same person in twice. When this happens, the fun really begins. It turns out the system doesn't only authorize the username that you sent them, but it also accidentally logs in the next account alphabetically too, and sends you their session. So, you end up with two people's information; one person you asked for, and one random person you didn't. If you log in at exactly the same time from three computers, you got three random accounts. With four, you got four accounts. With the thousands of computers I had at my disposal... I was about to see how well my math would hold up.

My foot started tapping against the tile floor anxiously when I distributed the lupine's username and password across all of Lylat, priming enough of my machines for the attack to completely and utterly annihilate Artec's system. One by one, the armada of small circular loading wheels on my screen gave way to bright check marks as each server finished its preparations, poised to strike. I smirked just a little when I saw the Phoenix Corporation servers send me their confirmation. Fara doesn't and won't ever know that I built a backdoor into her system expressly so I could use it for my own personal gain in situations like this. ...What? It's hardly the most morally dubious thing I've ever done. Besides, she owes me after how much of a bargain she insisted I sell her my tech for, the cheapskate.

After a few more seconds of waiting, every server had returned its ready signal, the troops mustered up to the front lines and prepared to fire at the unsuspecting Artec mainframe. My finger hovered over the enter key, steady and patient, my thoughts cool and eager, my plan rock solid. When I hit that button, I'd need to heist enough accounts before they shut me down so that it would be impossible for them to guess which one I'd be using. If I stole too few, they'd just start tracking those accounts and wait for something suspicious to pop up. No, I'd need to steal a lot of information for this to work. I took a deep breath. All I could do now was trust in my code. I stared at the static screen for just a moment longer, before the secret smile twitching on my lips finally goaded me into swiping across the return key.

Even though the world continued to bustle on by when I hit that key, it was only because everyone was completely oblivious to the steel wrecking ball I'd just smashed into the Artec mainframe. I couldn't help but let out a cocky chuckle when the momentum of thousands and millions of identical requests slammed into their unsuspecting system. The noise of the pleasant day might've chimed on around me, but in that instant, all I could focus on was the crippling blow I'd just dealt to Artec, was watching with glee as their architecture buckled under the hellstorm I'd unleashed on them. Their ping spiked off the charts, staggering under the crushing load. Within a fraction of a second, I had a dozen traces retaliating back against my onslaught, but they were too late. Account after account pinged out from their system, each one stocked with names, logins, pictures, you name it. A handful of my servers slammed to a halt when a roomful of surely panicking Artec employees completed their first traces and locked them out, but they still had a long way to go before they'd take me down completely. I took a peek at the edge of my display, grinning out of the corner of my mouth when I saw the number there:

 _Servers Remaining: 97%_

I wanted to leap to my feet, whooping and hollering when the first accounts began to finally trickle in. You have no idea how thrilled I was. I'd known about the exploit for weeks, but this was the first time I'd ever tried it in the field. And now, I was leading an army of the strongest, fastest computers in the system, directing each and every one of them towards decimating my helpless victim. They were sheep lead to slaughter. I watched with pride, and a fair amount of smug satisfaction, as the second wave of requests punched into Artec's network, ripping out even more accounts for my perusal. I started up a secondary routine, passively scanning the ID photos of every account I managed to steal. I needed one thing out of all of this: an employee who looked as much like me as possible. If I could find that, I could get anywhere.

I had their full, undivided attention at that point, but I was positive it wouldn't matter. Servers on the vanguard started began to drop faster than before, connections refused and blacklisted one by one, but so what? I still had thousands of machines lurking across the entire system, and there was no way they'd be able to identify them all in time. I leaned back in my chair, watching idly as accounts churned on the screen in front of me, sifting through every employee in search of a facial match for this pretty kitty. This would be easy as pie.

Unfortunately, my relaxation turned out not to be so well placed.

Before I'd even managed to let out a content sigh, a shrill sound blared in my ear, shaking me to my core. My eyes shot open as soon as I heard it. I instantly tore down to my monitor to figure out what the problem was, a spear of ice ripping through my stomach. My gut dropped. I only got that feeling when things were about to go very, very wrong. What I saw made my throat go drier than Titania, made me afraid on a mission for the first time in years. My hands leapt to the keyboard, frantically trying to make sure what I was seeing was some sort of bug in my code. Unfortunately, it was all entirely, sickeningly accurate.

 _Servers Remaining: 32%_

Just moments before, ninety-seven percent of my servers had been functional, clawing at their target. Now, most of them laid broken at my fingertips. I didn't understand or have time to figure out how they'd done it, but somehow, Artec had managed to put a bullet in a staggering number of my connections. I took a deep breath, trying desperately to hold down the chill that was seeping through my veins, and redoubling my efforts onto the few computers I had left. Every fiber in my body wanted to scream, wanted to panic, wanted to run right back out the door, but that wouldn't do me any good. I was the best technician in Lylat, dammit. I could handle this.

With just a few more keystrokes, I cut power to the servers that they had disconnected, re-routing every ounce of electricity I had to my remaining rigs. They might take damage with as much juice as I was pumping into them, but if I pulled this off, I'd be able to afford repairs for the next hundred years and still have enough left over to paint the Great Fox flaming pink. Accounts continued to dump themselves into my data banks, more slowly than before, but with a healthy dose of luck… I bit my tongue, chiding myself internally for trying to rely on something so fickle as fortune. Katt Monroe didn't need luck. I always got the job done.

My eyes darted up to corner of my screen to see how many servers were still running, but I immediately wished that I hadn't. Only twenty-four percent left. I gulped, my tongue and throat like sandpaper. How was it even possible for them to have identified so many of my computers so quickly? What had gone wrong? As soon as I asked myself those questions however, I noticed something else far more alarming, something far worse than a few bounced connections.

Buried beneath all my other windows and tools was a simple, flashing warning light. I had muted it earlier in the day simply because I'd figured I wouldn't need it. But now that I saw it activated, I knew that something was horribly, horribly wrong. Underneath the flashing light were three simple words, three words that made every muscle in my body lock.

 _Tracking In Progress_

My cursor leapt to the alarm, double clicking it in a vain hope that, just once this mission, it was simply a malfunction and not yet another thing trying to kill me. Sure enough, it was the latter. I groaned when I saw what the warning light was trying to alert me of: a lone infiltrator had somehow made it past my firewall, and was now digging through one of _my_ servers. When I saw that, everything clicked. Why all of my servers had gone offline, why somebody was inside my servers, it all made sense.

Artec had hired a hacker of their own. And this guy was good.

With as notorious as I was, there was no way this guy hadn't heard of me before. He'd probably kept a list of the servers I use frequently on hand, ready to shut down, just in case. That would explain why so many of my connections had gone offline immediately. That wasn't even the worst part, though. Now he was sifting through my own system just like I was tearing through his, and I'm positive he was only trying to find one thing: where the command center was. My knuckles went white, clenched around the sides of my laptop. If he searched for long enough, he was sure to eventually catch wind of a trail that would lead straight to the Artec headquarters in Corneria City, to the very chair I was sitting in. And if that happened… I gulped, my eyes darting up to a guard standing in the corner of the room. Put nicely, It would be the end of my story.

All of those thoughts streamed through my head in less than an instant. I took a deep breath. Now wasn't the time to panic. Now was the the time for solutions. Now was the time for Katt Monroe to kick this wannabe's ass. In the blink of an eye, I threw my attack into overdrive, routing energy from lighting and piloting aboard my server ships, and pumping everything into processing and cooling. My eye twitched when a handful of my servers simply popped, having literally burst into flames with the amount of energy screaming through them. Thankfully though, most managed to hold up. My fingers flew across the keyboard, constructing walls and barriers in front of Artec's hacker, diverting him away from the trail that would lead straight back to me. He tore through the obstacles as fast as I could construct them, cracking passwords and spoofing proxies with disturbing ease. Whoever this guy was, I'd have to see if I could hire him later. Or kill him.

After another few seconds spent watching the accounts trickle in and failing to halt the hacker's progress, I bit my lip, my heart thundering in my chest. I didn't want to admit it, but I'd been backed into a corner. There was only one possible way I could fight my way out of this, and even then, it would be a long shot. My only hope would be to continue on with the attack for as long as possible, pushing my hobbling handful of remaining computers past their breaking points to steal every last account I could get my hands on, and only back out the moment before Artec's guy could figure out where I was. I'd have to cut the attack at the last possible second, booting him out of the system at the same time. If I ducked out too early, I'd risk not having enough accounts stolen to finish the job. Too late, and the guns concealed by the guards wouldn't remain hidden for very long. The cords in my arms tensed, knowing I'd only have the briefest window to get this right. I felt like I spent an eternity sitting there, staring dumbstruck as each and every one of my security protocols was ripped to shreds, as my crippled army squeezed every last account out of Artec that it could find.

And yet, once those infinite moments had come and gone, I realized that I had run out of time. The warning light flashed green, then yellow, then dark crimson red when a tap was placed on the file that directly linked back to the laptop in my hands. I gulped, a cold sweat beading on my back, even while my fingers were stock still, precise and cold, waiting.

 _Three…_

 _Two…_

 _One…_

 _Now!_

My fist pounded the keyboard, plastic groaning under hand as I hit the kill switch. Across Lylat, thousands of servers and thousands of ships went dark, falling into radio silence as their each one of their generators was cut. The hustle and bustle around me was in stark contrast to the sharp concentration of my mind. I didn't breathe as I watched my screen with deadly focus, waiting to see if my last ditch plan had worked. My display showed that Artec's guy had successfully been booted out of my system, but I had no idea if he'd finished downloading my location already. I nearly screamed with anticipation as I sat quietly, waiting for a report on just how much he'd discovered while everything rebooted.

I'd been sitting attentive for a few seconds when I saw a small rustle of movement off in the distance, making my ear flick in anxiety. I looked up, but what I saw only made the butterflies in my stomach flutter faster.

Off in the corner of the room, one of the guards put a hand to his ear.

"Shit," I muttered under my breath. I kept my eyes glued to my screen, but the guard now had my complete and undivided attention through my peripheral vision. I tracked his every twitch, his every breath. The canine nodded once, keeping his hand to his ear, his mouth pressed in a serious line.

"It's probably nothing," I thought to myself, hoping fiercely for that to be true. Normally, I would've shrugged something like that off, sure it had nothing to do with me. But this entire mission had already gone so far off the rails, it was impossible to rest easy anymore. If the hacker had finished figuring out my position, it would already be too late to make a silent escape. A small side table and a thin accent wall would be all I'd have if I had to make a loud getaway, and I didn't like my odds of coming out of that with more than a few bullet holes and laser scorch marks.

My heart froze into ice when I saw the guard push off the wall behind him, and begin walking towards me. The people around me jabbered into their devices, the ditzy wolf giggled at her screen, but my eyes were locked front and center, straining to see every detail of the guard as he came closer and closer to where I was sitting. He wore a maddening poker face that I couldn't make heads or tails of. Was he distracted, or formulating a plan? Was he staring into space, or right at her? Was he aloof, or deadly serious?

Slowly, imperceptibly, I bent down over my still-churning laptop, reaching a hand down into my backpack. My fingers closed tight around the rigid plastic grip of the stun gun I had stowed away in there, my finger resting on the trigger. Every muscle in my body vibrated with dire tension. The distance between us closed faster and faster, first fifty feet across the room, then thirty, then only a mere fifteen feet away from me, looming in my vision. I tried to see where his eyes were focused, but his sunglasses and neutral expression were maddeningly impassive. My hand gripped the plastic tighter, prepared to lay him out in a moment's notice. Ten feet. Seven feet. Five feet. My legs were shaking with energy, ready to spring out from underneath me and flee the scene.

That was when, suddenly, the guard's head snapped to look straight at me.

I thought my heart was going to explode when his stony expression glared directly into my eyes. In an instant, the world around me became painfully vivid. Every twitch of his muscles, the glint off his glasses, the place where his suit didn't lay flat over his gun. In that moment, I knew the jig was up. I maneuvered the gun inside my bag so the discharge would slam him straight in the stomach. My finger pulled back on the trigger, until…

 _Ping!_

A notification from my laptop blinked in my ear. My eyes snapped down to see what it was trying to tell me. It was a good thing I did. I dropped the gun back into my bag with a ragged breath the instant I absorbed the quick report that had finally been generated after the attack.

 _Profiles secured: 78%. File tap: interrupted before completion._

I gasped silently, realizing that I'd been holding the air buzzing and angry in my lungs for the last eternity. I expelled the breath out of my chest, collapsing back into the vinyl cushions of the chair with a soft _whump_. Their hacker hadn't traced me. It was the best news I'd heard all week. The guard arched one eyebrow at me suspiciously, but he kept walking past me, presumably going to patrol a different area or respond to some punk kids running in the lobby. I really didn't care. All I knew was this report meant he didn't care about me. My poor heart had earned a well-deserved break after the chaos of that last offensive, so I decided to give it a minute to slow, no matter how many odd glances I may have gotten from passersbye.

The blackness behind my eyelids was only comforting for the briefest of moments, however. You know me. Sitting still isn't my strong suit. My mind had already moved onto the next step, one that wouldn't rely on such experimental glitches. Slowly, imaginary lines began to paint themselves on the blank canvas of darkness as the plan unfurled itself in my memory. I'd reviewed every step a hundred times before ever coming here, honing and sharpening it, cutting down every risk as small as I possibly could. With 78% of Artec's accounts under my thumb, I had free reign of the building. If they wanted to sort out all of that stolen information and stop me from getting in, they'd have to shut down nearly every building they owned across Lylat; a costly decision that they couldn't afford for the hours or days it would take to clean up the mess I'd made for them. Instead, they'd have to scan every person who came in to make sure that they weren't using a stolen account, like I was going to. That was where finding knock-off-Monroe came in.

I opened up the details of the report that was still sitting on my screen, and sure enough, my servers had managed to find an eerily accurate look-alike for this pretty kitty's face. I pulled up Violet Medheo's profile, both grimacing and giggling a little bit at seeing what my algorithm had picked out for my disguise. The resemblance was uncanny, there was no doubt about that - the same platinum blonde hair, same amethyst eyes, same hot pink fur… Well, not _quite_ the same. It would get me past a guard, but any of my friends would be able to pick the imposter out of a lineup. I smirked. I could practically hear my birdie in the back of my head, loudly extolling how much prettier I was than this wannabe. Sure, it might've just been a ploy to get me in bed, but... there was always genuineness behind it. Buried deep underneath meters of impenetrable sarcasm and ego, sure, but it existed.

With a few more keystrokes, I deleted all of her biometric information and replaced it with my own. Her fur structure, replaced. Her retinal scans, swapped. Her pawprints, gone. I was registered in the system, an Artec employee in everything but name. And now, it was time for my first day on the job. But if I did everything correctly… they were probably going to fire me before my first shift was over. Hehe. I love how good I am at this.

The final touch was to upload all of the information onto a blank ID card I had bought for a few credits off the net. I clicked the unassuming piece of white plastic into a card reader that I had hacked so instead of reading from the card, it would instead write information onto the card. With a keystroke and a blip, a soft white light glowed from the reader's face as it copied all of my information onto the badge, under the name Violet Medheo. Poor gal might get fired over this if I didn't clean up after myself. Might even get hauled off to prison. Of course the charges wouldn't stick, but I couldn't sleep easy knowing I had caused somebody such a headache. I took a few extra seconds to find her government ID in the mountain of data I had ripped off of Artec's servers, and traced it back a few steps to her bank. A few more clicks, and suddenly a couple hundred thousands credits were dumped into her personal account. I attached a short message to the anonymous deposit.

 _Sorry for the mess._

With that loose end tied up, it was time to move onto the next phase of the plan. With a graceful, fluid motion befitting a feline like myself, I slid my laptop back into its case, shouldered my pack, clipped my newly fabricated name badge next to my tie, and rose to my feet, doing my best not to breathe in the cheap perfume radiating off of the wolfess. She was a truly obnoxious person. Regardless, with my confidence restored and my plan back on track, I strode over to one of the turnstiles that granted entrance to the rest of the facility, taking my place in line behind the swarm of other employees. One by one they each swiped their ID badges and received a retinal scan from one of the guards posted nearby.

The sharp click of my dress shoes tapping against the marble below hit my ears with every inch I moved towards the guards, but I wasn't nervous. I'd taken the worst that Artec and their new hacker could throw at me, and still managed to sneak past their defences. Or, well, plow through them, as the case might have been. Regardless, I wasn't worried, because at that moment, they would have had to monitor and manually check thousands of employees coming in and out every second if they wanted to have any hope of catching me. That wasn't going to happen.

After a few more seconds of waiting impatiently, it was finally my turn to check in. The guard was slouched in place, clearly bored of playing border patrol for a bunch of accountants and engineers all day. Perfect. Boredom was exactly what I needed. It made people sloppy. Artec's turnstile thought for a moment as I held my fabricated card against it, but before long, I received a green circle confirming that Violet Medheo's credentials had checked out. The guard arched one eyebrow at me when he saw my blank white card instead of the usual sleek blues adorning the official Artec color scheme. I tossed my hair lightly, faking my best embarassed giggle.

"Sorry, first week on the job. They still haven't gotten me my official badge yet, so they loaned me this temporary one," I said, looking down and away slightly. He stared at me for a moment, but it seemed to mostly be out of apathy, because he grunted and shrugged his shoulders in response, holding up the retinal scanner for me to peer into. A quick pulse of red laser light flashed in my vision, leaving little blue lines branded onto my vision until I blinked them away. By the time I was seeing normally again, the glass doors in front of me had slid open, and the guard had already turned the remaining sliver of his waning attention onto the next employee, leaving me to stride right onto the private grounds of the Artec facility. I couldn't hold back my smirk.

 _Boredom gets a security system killed faster than anything else._

Luckily, this was anything but boring for me. I couldn't suppress a tiny giggle as the glass turnstile clacked shut behind me, leaving me in a long hall of impatient employees, yellow marble, and sleek metal elevator doors. The adrenaline in my veins was still pulsing strong and true, filling me with confidence. There was a tiny skip in my step as I whisked around the group of employees huddled by the closest elevators, and a happy hum in my throat as I looked for a lift that was relatively empty. At this rate, Fara would have her data in no time. The next step in the plan was to disable all the security on the floor where the data itself was stored. I was sure that Artec hadn't spared any expense in guarding their sensitive information. Luckily, Fara hadn't opted for the economy class hacker either. Katt Monroe is the best of the best.

/

A/N: Well, this was a little different for me! If you couldn't tell, I love Katt. I think she's a fantastic, criminally underutilized character. So, when I was designing the Brace for Impact universe, I decided I wanted to give her a role that she could really shine in, one where she could still be that solo rogue that we love, but really give her an ability to be an important and relevant factor in the plot. So, this was the result - hacker Katt! I think it's a great fit for her, even if it is unconventional.

Thus, I made this story to explore this characterization of her, and really try to get a feel for how she works. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, because I've had a blast writing this. Also, for any other computer nerds out there like me: I'm aware this isn't the most accurate portrayal of this sort of thing. It's spruced up and made a little more in the Hollywood hacking vein of things. It's a sub-genre that has a soft spot in my heart.

Anyway, there are two more chapters of this coming your way soon, the second of which is already completely written. It'll be out in another week or two. I hope you enjoy it when it comes around! Bye!


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 | Shutdown()

Towards the end of the hall, I stumbled upon a cluster of elevators that only a few people had gathered around. Within a couple moments, my ears flicked around, picking up the soft sound of a lift gliding to a rest nearby. A pair of door set in the wall slid open with a pleasant ding, practically inviting me to come up and wreak even more havoc. And, well, it would have been rude to refuse such an enthusiastic offer.

I filtered onto the luxurious lift last, behind a rather rotund hound who was a wearing a suit that was a few sizes too small for his frame. There were a few other people onboard, but the cabin itself was what caught my attention, rather than the surrounding unaware employees. The entire space was gilded within an inch of its life, complete with impeccably polished mirrors and brass fixtures on the back wall, and rich brown wood paneling framing it all. The buttons for each floor formed a tower of diamond jewels alongside the door, each glittering in the soft orange light radiating off of the twisting sconces lining the walls. It was a stark contrast to the ratty elevators I used in my private station hidden out in Meteos. There were certainly no embellishments in those elevators, unless you counted the copious duct tape I'd used to hold them together over the years. ...What? They were perfectly safe, except for the one in the corner of the base that had given out last year. There were more than enough credits in my account to refit every utility I had in my bunker out of solid gold, but I had more interesting things to build than elevators.

I clicked the button that would take me up to building security as the doors slid shut behind me. A soft song started to play, a rather romantic saxophone solo, if I'm not mistaken. The floor of the elevator shuddered before rocketing away from the ground a moment later, shuttling its passengers up to their destinations. One by one, they each filtered out, leaving to go fill out whatever paperwork they had to type up, or bug some poor IT worker because they'd forgotten their password over the weekend. The portly hound waddled out last, huffing as he pulled his card from his pocket and swiped onto his floor. The doors dinged shut after a quiet moment, leaving me alone with nothing but my thoughts, my reflection, and my equipment. I took a moment to peek inside my backpack and make sure all my gear was in order. A personal defense stun gun, painted an alarming mixture of saftey yellow and, my own personal addition, a few bold pink stripes. A small army of screwdrivers and other tools. And finally, a thick black plastic case, containing my laptop and another toy of the trade.

I hastily zipped my pack back up when elevator let out its final soft ping, letting me know that it had arrived at my stop: security. The doors parted, revealing a dimly lit greeting room exuding a distinctly damp scent. My nose wrinkled when I stepped in. Compared to the sleek, sterile, progressive look of the main lobby, this room was a little more… broken in. I glanced around the space, taking in the stained carpet and dust covered magazine racks until my eyes landed on the only other person in the room. He was a wiry, short dog, dressed in a wrinkled security shirt with his feet propped up on his desk. He had a pair of earphones on, and his attention was fixated on the screen of his communicator. Over his shoulder, I could make out a few shots of two scantily clad women who appeared to be on the brink of exploring a very active love life together. I rolled my eyes. He was _that_ kind of guard. This was going to be too easy.

Before the canine had a chance to notice me, I quickly undid the top buttons of my suit and blouse, airing out the first couple inches of my... "diplomatic assets". I squeezed my chest together with my arms, making sure my cleavage was nice and visible even in this dark room. Subtlety wasn't what I was going for during this leg of the plan. I put on my best coy smile, using my arms to keep the pair of diplomats nice and perky before I stepped up to his desk. The poor guy did a double take when he saw me. Maybe it was because somebody had caught him watching "stimulating" material on the company network, but my own personal ego likes to think my chest might have inspired him nearly falling backwards in his chair.

The guard scrambled to present himself with some decorum, kicking his feet off the table and centering the hat that was perched askew on his head. He straightened his back and puffed out his chest, doing the best he could to take up more space that his diminutive build normally allowed for. His ploy to look more manly might've worked too, if his badge wasn't pinned on upside-down.

The canine cleared his throat, giving me a grimy smile laced with suggestiveness. The bait I had laid for him had obviously earned a bite. I laughed back quietly, beginning to weave my illusion. "Well hey there, angel," the guard started, throwing his voice down a few octaves lower than I'm sure was natural. "What's something as pretty as you doing down here?" For some reason, everybody in that building seemed like they were in a competition to make me gag. I didn't let my revulsion show though, instead giggling with feminine mystery a little louder this time, treating his bland compliment like it was the nicest thing anybody had ever said to me. I strode over to his desk, swaying my hips with every step, making sure he saw plenty of what I had to offer. By the way his eyes widened, I'd say I advertised pretty well. I came to a halt as I brushed up against the front of his station, bending forward ever so slightly so he got a brief, teasing peek down my blouse before I turned to the side again, hiding the goods from view. Like any good entertainer, leave them wanting more.

"My boss told me I needed to come down here to get my badge," I purred in a low tone. A shudder shook down his spine as my alluring voice hit his ears. I swear, sometimes this job was too easy. And too much fun. "If there's anyone around here who can help me out, I'd appreciate it…" I trailed off, lazily dragging one finger across a pile of papers and coming to a rest an inch away from his own. He reached out to try and grab a hold of my hand, but I pulled it back just before he made contact, giving him a tiny smirk. "I can always come back later, if I need to."

The canine snapped up in his chair, his eyes glued to mine with an expression of sudden panic. He leapt to his feet, banging his knee on his desk in the process and letting a few muffled curses out into his shoulder. "No, w-wait," he stammered out in a notably higher tone than earlier, reaching out the hand that had come so close to brushing into mine, only to be left woefully empty at the last second. "I can help you. Here," he said, recovering and lowering his voice down again, trying to regain his composure. The guard bent over his terminal, his hands hovering over the keys. "Tell me your name?" He looked up expectantly, a little hope in his eyes. I gave him a tiny smile as I pretended to deliberate, swaying on my feet ever so slightly.

"Krystal. Krystal Black," I hummed, practically able to hear his heart fluttering in his chest. His hands flew across the keys as he scrambled to type the name in. I couldn't help but notice him having to hit the backspace more than once because of anxious misspellings. Amateur. He frowned after he hit enter, presumably because he couldn't find an entry for my fake name. The dog tried again, typing more carefully this time, but his frown only grew when his search still came up blank. I cleared my throat, having to restrain myself from chuckling at the obvious fluster growing in his thoughts. "Is there a problem?" I asked, a hint of laughter filtering through into my question.

He deliberated for a while, biting his lip as he mulled over a vexing mental decision. On the outside, I was cool, calm, flirty. But on the inside, I was just as nervous as he was. I knew what he was trying to decide. The angel on one of his shoulders was yelling at him to turn me away, maybe even to call for backup. The guy on the other shoulder was telling him quite the opposite, however: take me back to make a permanent ID despite not finding me in the system, and possibly earn a little compensation for his time. The wolf blinked a few times to himself, seemingly coming to a decision. He looked up at me, his expression of false bravado newly plastered to his face.

"No problem," he said, stepping out from behind his desk, taking a few jaunting steps towards me. Even on his tip-toes, he still barely stood at my height, but he certainly tried to make up for it with his cocky grin. "Just follow me this way, Ms. Black," he said in a voice dropped to an even deeper bass than before, gesturing to a security door on the far wall. "My name is Dirk, by the way," he stated, swiping his badge through the card reader and opening the doorway for the both of us. He risked a glance over his shoulder to make sure I was still in tow, and sure enough, he found me right in stride with him, still watching him through half-shut eyelids. I was in.

The door sealed behind us after we'd passed into the next hallway. It was just as depressingly lit and decorated as the room before it. The walls and carpet were a sad dusk blue, with an army of unnecessary plastic file holders bolted onto doors at random. The lights on the wall barely put out enough luminance to see with. One of the bulbs next to me flickered sadly, on its last leg before it would inevitably kick the bucket. The sounds assaulting my ears were in stark contrast to the total lack of life that met my eyes, however. Phones rang and blared gleefully over each other, all seemingly in a competition to be answered first. Indiscernible security and police codes tumbled out of static-ridden radios, intermixed with the equally unintelligible cries of the other guards bustling around the halls. They shoved past each other with arms full of papers, food, or both. None of them were too busy to let their eyes linger on me though. I let out a short breath of amusement. Seems like all those days in front of the screen hadn't hurt my figure too much.

Dirk shot me a quick grin as we paced through the halls, moving deeper and deeper into the security facility. I returned the look as best I could, but most of my attention was devoted to peeking through all of the doors we were passing. I needed to figure out where the security footage and systems were being hosted. If I could get into their server room, I could find some way of disabling it, and move forward with the plan without being busted only one step in. Unfortunately, all I was seeing were reception areas, a break room, a locker, a gym, another break room, a bathroom, yet another break room… I swear, they had more break rooms than actual useful rooms. Part of me wanted to let my defenses down, to be lulled into a false sense of security, because judging by what I was seeing, these sore excuses for guards were well out of their depth in my presence. There was a reason Fara was paying me an ungodly amount of money to pull this heist though. I needed to keep my head on my shoulders, because this place was a wolf in sheep's clothing.

"So," the guard said, turning a corner and nearly colliding into a coworker who shot us a dirty look, "it uh, it is _Ms._ Black, right?" he tried to ask casually, while utterly failing to conceal the hopeful subtext to his question. I laughed quietly, my tail flicking pleasantly in the background. Now that we were close together, I had to hold my breath because of the rather overpowering scent of his rose-scented cologne. His pitch-black fur was slicked back with gallons of gel. Birdie might have used too much body spray from time to time, but at least he left his feathers free from enough goop and product to make a wax replica of himself. Despite his rather unappealing looks, I pretended to eye him up and down, deliberating on what he had to offer.

"I've already got a partner, sugar," I purred, having to restrain a chuckle at his crestfallen expression he failed to conceal even partially. "My girlfriend and I have an open relationship though…" I added, nearly bumping into him when he tripped over his own feet in surprise. He made a short choking noise before he managed to stand up straight again.

"O-oh, is t-that so?" he managed. I nodded softly, tossing my hair over one shoulder a letting out a soft coo in the back of my throat.

"Fay is great," I said shortly, knowing exactly how to deal the knockout punch. "Of course, we have been looking for a third to join us and help spice things up a little…" I snuck a quick glance at the guard, and wasn't disappointed. He might've been trying to keep his cool, but between his muscles locking up harder than steel, and his blush washing across his cheeks and throat, he wasn't convincing anybody.

"W-wow, that uh, sounds fun," he laughed, taking a deep breath in the process. Poor guy. I'm sure he was plenty confident around women normally, but I was dropping the hydrogen bomb of flirting on him right now. "I don't suppose you two are taking applications, are you?" he laughed noncommittally, while being woefully transparent. He was playing right into my hand, hook, line, and sinker.

I let out a series of admonishing tuts, pretending to scold him while still lacing my words with plenty of sugar. It was go time: I needed to lay it on thick, and secure the kill. "My, my, is somebody asking for an application?" I purred, weaving a sultry growl into my words. I lifted one hand up, trailing it across his shoulder before dragging it down between his shoulder blades. I could feel him shudder with delight. He spun around, looking at me with hunger and cockiness. Perfect. I was tapping into his emotions, getting him to think with his junk instead of his head. I could see it in his eyes. He wanted to do something stupid. And I was going to be ready to take full advantage of that when the moment came.

"Well, how about I take a little break," he growled, wrapping one hand around my waist, pulling me in close to him, doing his best to look muscle-bound and studly. The preposterous sight left me wanting to burst into hysterics, throw up in disgust, and lay him out flat all at once. Unfortunately, I needed to keep the ruse up for just a few more moments, so I let out a loud purr, brushing up against his torso. I bit my bottom lip and ran a teasing finger through his hair, subtly wiping the residue off on my clothes where he wouldn't notice. "And while I'm off, we can go do a little interview?" he murmured, his lukewarm breath bounced off my ears and cheek, forcing me to resist recoiling away from the smell of leftover lunch on his breath. Instead, I nuzzled up against his cheek, gripping the inside of his thigh with one hand.

"Let's see what you've got," I whispered into his ear.

That was the last straw for the poor guy. He let out a noise somewhere between a growl and a whimper, almost melting into to me. In under a second, I felt him dragging me towards a nearby closet, flinging the door open and shoving the both of us in together. The moment that he had it sealed shut behind us, I let out a low growl, pushing him hard up against the wall. I could see his beady eyes eating up all of my curves, his sight lingering on the valley of my cleavage.

"Just lean back, honey," I murred, grabbing him by the tie and licking my lips. "And let me do all the work." All the poor guard could manage was to nod once, breathing heavily, a noticeable tent already in his pants. I bent forward, burying my nose in the fur of his neck, dragging my barbed tongue up the length of his throat. I had to use a bottle's worth of mouthwash to get the taste of his fur gel out after that. It had exactly the effect I wanted however, and he went limp in my arms, totally surrendering himself to me. I had him precisely where I wanted him.

Slowly, still holding onto his tie, I slid one leg around his, grinding up and down against him with the rest of my body. I leaned into his muzzle, watching his eyes close and lips pucker as he expected the fun to really begin. He was out of luck.

Before he had to chance to realize what was happening, I shoved him hard to the side, throwing him to the ground by his tie and tripping him over the leg that I had entangled around him. He hit the floor with a shocked yip and a heavy _thud_ , gasping as the wind was knocked out of him by the sudden impact. His eyes went wide as he looked up at me, horrified, clutching instinctually for anything to hold onto. I wouldn't give him a chance. I threw my weight on top of him, pinning both of his arms to the ground and slamming his chest back down. In one fluid motion, I slid a heavy iron wrench out of my pack, gripped the handle tight in both hands, and slugged him on the temple with as much force as I could muster. A loud metallic _clank_ resonated around the room, and suddenly, Dirk was out cold underneath me.

I sat on top of him for another several seconds, my wrench readied above my head in case I had to give him a second helping. He was going to be under for a while though, after a blow to the skull like that. I stood up once I was absolutely sure he was unconscious, brushing the dust off my suit and flicking my hair back behind my ears. I quickly redid the top buttons of my shirt and pushed my tie back into place, resuming my professional appearance as easily as I had undone it. I took a deep breath, holding the musty closet air in my lungs for few moments before expelling it back out. So far, everything was going according to plan. I was inside the security floor, and nobody knew I was here. Unfortunately, I hadn't spotted anything more complicated than a refurbished laptop on the way in here, so now, I'd have to do a little sleuthing to find the server racks I needed.

I slid one arm out of the backpack I was carrying, and then the other, tossing it on the floor unceremoniously next to Dirk's crumpled figure. After feeling around inside, my fingers closed around a cool plastic handle, and I yanked the unmarked black case it was attached to out into the open. Snapping open the two metal clasps holding the box shut, I took inventory of the different items I had stored in there. My laptop, a few assorted pieces of hardware, data spheres, and scrap. And, of course, my favorite little partner in existence. I grinned a silly little smile when I undid the short velcro strap securing my quadcopter in place, bringing it out into the open and weighing it in my hands.

At first glance, it might have just appeared to be a small novelty for a child to play with, perhaps crash into a tree in a park and never see again. This piece of machinery, however, couldn't be bought in a cardboard box. Its sleek, curved body had four branching arms, each one connected to a tiny, downwards-facing propellor meant to help it hover in midair. I clicked the circular, indented button on its underside, and was rewarded with a series of bright flashing lights and happy chirps as it booted up. I giggled a little at the chipper hover bot. It was definitely coded to be one of my happier pieces of hardware, and it showed in everything from its bright pink plastic to the ecstatic blips it let out during its boot sequence. Don't let its pleasant demeanor fool you though. This little bot had a nasty temper whenever I needed to get a job done. It could sneak around a building without getting noticed, but he was more than just stealthy. I'd loaded it up with plenty of firepower to defend itself when things went loud.

I tossed it lightly into the air over my shoulder, not bothering to watch where it was going to land. Moments before it was about to dash itself against the cold concrete underfoot, its propellers whirred to life, sending out a short gust of wind and bringing itself to a steady hover millimeters from the ground. I cracked open the lid of my laptop while it waited patiently, connecting my computer up and starting my remote controls. Once my laptop was properly synced up with the bot, I pressed a few keys to bring it to a hover right in front of me. The tiny machine obeyed instantly, floating gracefully right in front of my face. I giggled again, poking it lightly with my finger.

"Good morning, Pinky," I said to it as it recalibrated from my touch and came to a halt again. It chirped happily back at me, bobbing up and down in the air, excited. ...Yeah, I programmed my robot to talk to me. So what? It gets lonely, being cramped up in my base by myself all the time. Anyway, after running a few basic exercises to make sure Pinky still had full mobility, and had run diagnostics on all of his tools, I prepared to send him out into the wild.

I rose to my feet, looking around the compact closet for a vent of some sort. I could try to send Pinky out to fly through the hallways if I needed to, but in such close quarters, it wouldn't take long for somebody to notice him. If that happened, at worst, the floor would be locked down and I would be trapped, and at best, somebody would get a butterfly net and steal my expensive hardware. Luckily, my hunch was correct, and I found a small ventilation shaft near the ceiling at the back of the room. I grabbed a screwdriver out of my pack, and quickly undid the bolts holding the cover over it. Behind, I saw a long tunnel that quickly faded into total darkness. I could barely fit an arm into the vent, let alone try to squeeze my curvy figure in there, but luckily, it was just the right size for Pinky.

I knelt back down in front of my screen, clicking a few more buttons that brought Pinky right in front of the passageway. I wouldn't be able to use its flashlight, not without every single other vent on the floor seeing bright flash of light as it floated by. Instead, I flipped his camera onto infrared mode, and suddenly, everything became clear in front of the drone. I turned to face the bot, blowing it a final kiss goodbye.

"Fly safe, my adorable little killbot," I said, pressing a button on my laptop, sending him sailing onwards into the darkness of the tunnel.

Now, it was time to lose myself in the camera feed and the controls. It took a few minutes, and a few more instances of bumping Pinky into the vent's walls than I'd care to admit, but eventually I fell in sync with the system. The walls of the shaft were close-quarters at first, presumably because I was still at the outskirts of the security floor when I knocked out Dirk. After drifting along the winding path for a few minutes, thankfully, the narrow passage opened up into a larger path, with other tunnels like mine feeding out of it. Good. That was exactly what I wanted. Ideally, I wanted to trace all of this ventilation back to its source, because where there was massive amounts of cooling, there was something massive that needed to be cooled. Such as, for example, a large server array. And as it turned out, my hunch was correct again.

After several more minutes of bonking against walls and fighting against an increasingly turbulent headwind inside the vents, my thermal camera was blinded by a sliver of white streaking across the screen. Flipping the feed back over to my normal cam, I let out a sigh of relief at finally encountering the end of the road. The ventilation system had reached its origin point. Which meant, ideally, I'd now find my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I inched forward, slipping myself through the wider gaps of the industrial cooling vents. Emerging from the darkness of the snaking vent system, my camera needed a moment to readjust to the blinding light of the sterile server room I'd popped into. The more the view came back into focus, the more I could discern about my new surroundings. The square tiles spanning the floor were pure white, looking as though a very fastidious janitor had devoted a lifetime to cleaning each one individually. The space was minimally decorated, sequestering as much room as possible for the rows of servers churning in the middle of the room. They nearly deafened my poor little bot, their whirring and groaning assaulting Pinky's audio levels. I twisted around a few times, trying to get a lay of the land, hoping to spot something useful. Thankfully, after buzzing along a wall of blinking lights and titanium casing, I arrived at the far end of the room, and was greeted by two things. The first was a door, presumably to let technicians or guards come and go. The second was a small table with a monitor sitting atop it, complete with a bright, shiny port just dying to be plugged into.

Clicking a few more buttons on my keyboard, a small silver connector emerged from the side of the bot. I flew over to the desktop, taking one more look around before hooking into the system. Everything looked quiet and still. There was nobody in the room, and it didn't appear as though I had set off any alarms by slipping in through the vents. Everything was in order, save for one little detail that made me uncomfortable. Directly across from the computer that I needed an uplink to was the door. A door that any guard on a patrol could open up and see a very suspicious quadcopter jacked into their mainframe, if they were observant enough. The time I would need to be connected to their system wasn't all that long, maybe just a minute or two. But if somebody strolled through that door, it was going to be hard to avoid a fight.

Still, I had come too far to back down now. I inched Pinky forward, giving myself the quick burst of I needed power to couple up to the port. After a quick snap and a jostle to the camera, I was connected. A small wheel started spinning on my laptop as Pinky began establishing a bridge between their computer and mine. I swiveled the camera around to take a glance at the door one more time. Still sealed tight. With a deep breath, I hit the button that had just popped up on my screen, taking control of their security terminal remotely. It put up a fight, but clearly, most of the effort had been put into keeping people out of the room storing the machines, rather than installing high end security software on the machines themselves.

After a few minutes of shuffling around in their system, I finally stumbled onto the feeds that were streaming all of their cameras and other sensors. With a little more effort, I managed to pick out the thread for the floor that I needed to get to: floor 256. It wasn't hard to do, considering that a good third of all the security devices in the building seemed to all by housed on that floor. Cameras, trip wires, sentry devices, thermal imaging, even passive radioactive particle counters. I let out a long, low whistle. Whatever Fara wanted me to get for her off of this level, Artec clearly didn't want to let go of. Still, it was nothing I couldn't handle. If I could disable all of their sensors, it would blind everything on that floor. And a security system without eyes isn't much of a security system. Best of all, they wouldn't even realize they couldn't see. I clicked a few more buttons on my keyboard, and initiated the process of killing each of those live feeds, and instead replacing them with a short ten-second loop of boring, uneventful footage. Somebody would notice the discrepancy eventually, but by then, I would be long gone. Once the connection was firm and Pinky was churning away doing all my dirty work for me, I leaned back, resting my head against one of the cold metal shelves behind me. I let my eyes close for a second time that operation, reveling in how relaxing this job could be sometimes.

And for a second time, I was jolted back to alertness by an unexpected noise.

My eyes flashed back open at the unmistakable mechanical grinding of a door opening. My muscles tensed to steel, my hand leaping back to my wrench, ready to spring into action. When my eyes locked onto the door however, it was still shut tight, and the only other person in the room was Dirk's splayed figure. That was when I realized the door opening wasn't in my room - it was opening in Pinky's. Snapping my vision down to the camera feed, I saw what I'd known was bound to happen. The lights on the server room door were flashing green. The whine of electronic locks disengaging and hiss of hydraulics unclasping hit my ears. With a gulp, I saw the door slide open, and two Artec guards stride in with rifles in hand.

Instantly, my mind jerked into overdrive. Had I set off a silent alarm? Was this just a random patrol? Judging by the fact that their weapons were drawn, I doubted it was a random search. I must have tripped an alert that I hadn't noticed. But then, why hold their guns so casually? Whatever the case, I couldn't afford to disconnect Pinky now. It was so close to finishing the upload… At this point, I'd have to cross my fingers and hope that they didn't see me. If I could just finish the alterations, I could improvise from there. I bit my bottom lip, my fingers hovering over the keys but knowing that, ultimately, I was at the mercy of their perceptiveness.

"I don't know why we're even bothering to investigate this," one of the two guards muttered aloud. I sized him up quickly. Medium height, solid build. He looked distracted, but he held his weapon with professional rigor. "This room sets off more false alerts than a smoker in a fire alarm factory."

The door shut behind the two of them, sealing but not locking. The other guard came into full view after a moment, but what I saw didn't make me any more comfortable. Tall, muscular, and he carried his weapon with similar casual caution. These two weren't the same cannon fodder I had seen so far. These were the Artec agents that I needed to be worried about, the ones famed for their brutality. "Suck it up," the second one said back in a short, gruff tone. His eyes were scanning the room from side to side, checking any point he thought an intruder might stow away in. He didn't seem to expect anything to meet his efforts, but he appeared wary nonetheless. "This room goes down, we lose our eyes everywhere, so just do your job and figure out what set the alarm off."

I grunted to myself unhappily. So, I had tripped an alarm somewhere along the way. It seemed like there were plenty of false positives to cover my tracks though, so at least they weren't on red alert. I glanced down at my progress bar, the readout making my tail flick unhappily behind me. I was so close to being done. Just a few more streams needed to be diverted, and I'd be in the home stretch of this infiltration. A cold bead of sweat trickled down my back. I couldn't fail now. I couldn't.

"Fine," the first guard said unhappily, holstering his weapon at his back and taking a few brisk steps over to the vent I had slipped in through. "It was this one that set it off. Probably just a piece of dust, or a chip bag that one of the IT nerds left behind." He pulled a screwdriver off his belt, twisting the bolts a few times and loosening the grate covering the entrance. After that, he needed to get through the magnetic fence, which was sealed with a keycode. He sighed with his hand hovering over the number pad, trying to remember the code, but clearly not recalling. He mumbled a few more choice curses under his breath as he reached into his pocket, pulling out his phone. A series of blips hit Pinky's speakers when he unlocked the device, and presumably, navigated over to a document where he had stored the relevant code. I smirked when he set the unlocked phone down next to him as he worked.

An unlocked phone was a very useful asset that he'd just given me.

I clicked a few more buttons on my laptop, starting up a routine to try and wirelessly connect Pinky to his phone. Sure enough, I was able to couple up with it by mimicking his home computer's address, fooling it into thinking that it was communicating with a safe device. Unfortunately, it was communicating with me now. I downloaded every file I could scrounge up. Who knows? Could come in handy.

The first guard was preoccupied running diagnostics on the alarm I had tripped, but unfortunately, the second guard wasn't so relaxed. I held my breath as he paced within the frame of my camera, checking a corner here, a spare parts locker there. I let out a silent, frustrated hiss. Why did this guy have to be so persistent? If he kept his search up, it would only be a matter of time before he spotted Pinky hooked into the network. My fists clenched when he turned around, facing directly into the camera. My finger hovered on the abort button, ready to unleash Pinky's claws at a moment's notice. He stared at the camera for a long, unending moment, torturing the voices in my mind that were screaming that I should neutralize him now, while I still had the chance. I just needed a few more seconds though…

"There, see?" the first guard said, forcing both my and the other guard's head to swivel over and look at him. "It was just a split second beam interruption. We get those all the time, it's nothing. Can I get back to my lunch now?"

"You know the drill," he said, readjusting his grip on his gun. My sights were still dead fixed on his chest. If things went downhill, I'd need to drop him first. "Sweep the room once, and then we can leave." The first guard groaned, slamming the grate back up and twirling the screws back into place.

"Whatever. But you have to check all the awkward corners up here, I get the long, easy hallways back there." The second guard grunted in agreement, but the other was already stomping off, not leaving any room for argument. I sat with baited breath, watching him move methodically around the room, checking everything he could find. I gulped, continuing to rotate Pinky's camera around, tracking his every move. My finger rested on the execute button, ready to strike. It felt like a spent an eternity monitoring his movements, just waiting for him to spin around and take a shot at my drone. Just waiting to go loud, and need to book it out of the floor.

By some miracle though, after it felt like years had gone past, Pinky finally finished modifying the streams. Now, Artec was completely blind on the floor I needed to hack into. Slowly, carefully, I disengaged the Pinky from the desktop's port, coming to a silent hover behind a stack of burnt-out hard drives on the desk. Once I had waited out their search, I could find a safe place to decommission Pinky, and be on my way. I let out a quick sigh of relief, thinking that maybe, just maybe, I had pulled this off. Everything was going fine. I was hidden, and the guards were about to finish their sweep.

Unfortunately, as with everything else on that mission, I was out of luck.

I gasped when, suddenly, my camera feed was cast into dark shadow by the second guard stepping right in front of the desktop I had just hacked. He had kept a healthy distance during the entirety of his sweep, but now, he loomed huge in the camera, towering over Pinky. I could see every stitch in his clothing, from the creases made by the bulletproof vest he wore beneath his uniform, to the gun holstered at his side. My knuckles turned white as I had to use every ounce of willpower not to blast him right then and there, and send him stone cold unconscious to the floor.

"Just gonna check the cams real quick, then we can go." I let out a stream, a river of solid swearing. He was about to open up the streams for this room. Streams that, very clearly, would show a plethora of unauthorized modifications that I had just made to them. There was no avoiding it now. It was time to go loud. The guard squinted his eyes, peering close at the screen. He opened his lips in shock, reaching for the gun at his side. "Hey! What the hell is th-"

He never finished his sentence.

A piercing _zap_ punched through the room as I hit the kill switch, slamming twenty thousand volts of blinding electricity into his chest. His eyes snapped wide open and his mouth contorted in pain, but no sounds escaped his lips as he hit the ground with a solid _thud_ , knocked out. I pounded my keyboard, adrenaline surging through my veins. The previously pleasant green light on Pinky's chasis flared blood red, and every ounce of electricity flowing through him was redirected to roaring his motors into overdrive, into cramming as much energy as possible into the momentum that would drop the last guard. His other guard spun around on his heel at hearing his partner drop, his hand smoothly ripping his weapon out of its holster. I growled, baring my teeth. I couldn't let him fire that gun, or the entire floor would transform into an inescapable bunker.

I threw everything into sending Pinky hurtling across the room, sprinting past servers fast enough they morphed into a blur. The engines smoked with effort, as I passed far more energy through them than they were ever designed to handle, but everything worked just long enough to finish the job. The final guard had his rifle shouldered, but it didn't matter. All he had time to do was flinch before Pinky's girth smashed him directly in the forehead, speeding faster than any car traveling on the highways. The poor drone lost control in the impact, flipping and slamming against a nearby wall, crippling everything but its most basic functions. The guard didn't fare much better. The force of the blow jerked his head back, and he sank to the ground unceremoniously, unconscious.

I let out a long sigh of relief when the last guard slumped to the floor. I leaned back once more. Nothing could go right for me though, and so of course, as soon as I thought I had finally made it out of the jungle, one more noise buzzed through my earphones to drag me right back into the fray. Even through the battered hiss of Pinky's microphone, critically damaged by the impact, I heard a woman's garbled voice in my ears.

"Come in, Delta 2," her gruff voice like sandpaper over the guard's communicator. "Server room status? Over." Only the fact that I was camped out behind enemy lines stopped me from releasing a monstrous, fraught groan. In all the excitement, I had neglected to realize that these two guards would likely need to report their findings. I would have to report in for them, somehow.

It took a few attempts and a lot of depressed blips and beeps from Pinky, but eventually I managed to lurch the bot over towards the guard's body, despite the fact that one of its four motors was malfunctioning, and the camera lens had a web of cracks across snaking across it. Pinky's short range transmitter must have been busted, because I couldn't seem to find his walkie-talkie over my scans. Instead, I had to drag the quickly fading bot over towards his communicator, and physically push down on the talk button.

"Server room clear. Over," I stated with a few words as possible, lowering my voice into a deeper bass. I'd hoped that would be enough to assuage their fears, but unfortunately, the pesky, grating voice came again over the coms.

"Confirmation code?" she asked, clearly on a short fuse. The blood in my veins instantly ran cold as ice. How was I supposed to know what the confirmation code was? If I didn't say _something_ , they would send even more guards to check in on these two, and I wouldn't be able to keep the ruse going then. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat with little success. I was backed into a corner, and every millisecond of silence where I couldn't produce the code was an instant closer to blowing my cover. I was sure that I had finally bitten off more than I could chew.

But that was when I remembered the guard's phone.

A surge of adrenaline blasted through my frantic mind. I had downloaded the contents of the guard's phone. He'd had the vent code on it. Maybe he also had the confirmation code. With hands that were only steady because of years of rote experience at a keyboard, I searched the entire contents of the guard's phone, looking for anything labeled as a confirmation code. And, once again, my quick thinking was rewarded with a way out. I nearly jumped for joy, barely restraining myself from doing a little dance over Dirk when I found an ten digit code, entered into his phone right before he left to investigate the mess I'd made. I hopped back onto the coms, stating it out loud.

"48-61-6C-65-79. Over," I nearly gasped, trying to hold my voice at a level volume the entire time. The woman on the other end thought for a moment, and finally came back with a response that made me want to melt into the floor with sheer relief, four words that finally put me in the home stretch of this mission.

"Acknowledged, Delta 2. Out."

I was in the clear. I had fooled everyone in their security division, from Dirk, to their security feeds, to the patrol, and even to this woman. They were totally blind on the 256th floor, and they didn't even know it. I was in. Now, all I had to do was get up there, and steal whatever the hell Fara and Artec were making all this fuss about.

Before I could though, one last, soft beep came over my speakers. I looked down, and saw an armada of deep crimson warning lights flashing on Pinky's display. A pang of sadness clawed through my heart. His system was broken beyond repair, and I knew that he wouldn't last more than a few more minutes before he finally petered into nonexistence. I smiled a sad little smile, putting my hand up to the screen, letting my fingertips brush over his dire diagnostics. "You did good, Pinky. I'm proud of you," I said softly, bringing up the final button that would send him his permanent shut-down signal. A few broken, but still miraculously cheerful beeps came over the channel as one of his motors finally gave out, sending him clattering to the floor, immobile. "I'll see you again soon. I promise," I whispered. With just a moment of hesitation, I sent the shutdown signal out. Across the building, a powerful electromagnet pulsed with electricity for a moment, scouring his hard drives clean, and finally putting him to rest.

"Good little robot," I said to the darkness of the room, nothing but me and my computer left to finish the mission. And it would be a hell of an uphill battle.

/

A/N: Poor Pinky. It's a tough business. Luckily, he's just an AI, so I'm sure Katt can reconstitute him after this is all said and done! Just one more chapter of this story, and then it'll be done! I've almost got that one done, just a little more writing I've gotta do for it. And then, onwards to Fox and Krystal fun times!


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3 | Kill()

People are constantly surrounded by computers. Way more than, really, I think anyone realizes. When you've devoted as much time to destroying, building, and infiltrating computers as I have, you tend to develop a skill at finding those hidden processors in the background that make life work. When I stepped onto the elevator that would take me up to the final floor, the floor that held my ultimate prize, I couldn't help but play my subconscious game of seeing just how many there were concealed around me.

The doors closed shut with a pleasant ding, bumping together just after I whisked my happily flicking tail through the gap. That was one computer, controlling the elevator and all its functions. Everything from the echo of muffled saxophone wafting over the speakers, the intermittent blip of each passed floor, and even the lights shining behind the button were all controlled by at least one onboard computer. Hacking into that one wouldn't be too difficult. Just find the building's utilities, and work my way in from there. Floors continued to pass by at an increasing pace, escorting me up to that magic floor 256.

Another computer probably controlled all of the elevator's security and emergency protocols. If one of the cables were to snap, or the lift lost power, that processor would jump in to keep anything catastrophic from occurring, and would automatically alert the authorities. That one would be more difficult to crack, but I bet I could find a way to slip in through the security floor that I'd just left. If I wanted to, I could disable any computerized emergency responses meant to stop the lifts from smashing into the ground, or inhibit security from realizing that an elevator was offline. Disturbing, but true.

I glanced up at the bright green display on the wall that read out the floor I was on. I was going to arrive in a few more seconds. If I had done my job correctly, all of the automated security responses on the floor should have been neutralized, meaning I could stride right on in and start poking around in their servers. If I had missed something, however… between the cameras, turrets, drones, and EMP generators, I'd be knocked flat on my ass instantly, and hauled off to the darkest cell Artec could find. And it would take a lot of cleverness to unstick myself from that mess.

But, truth be told, my concern was just a baseline, healthy skepticism that evolved from working with infuriating technology for a living. I'd seen just about everything in this profession, and I knew that if it could go wrong, it would go wrong. I was great at my job though, and I knew that I had done everything correctly. Probably.

I distracted myself for the remaining time in the lift with my little game, counting each of the computers tucked away in the nooks and crannies of the elevator: in the wifi router installed in the ceiling, in the emergency communicator set into the wall, in the hidden radio transceiver that my custom communicator was detecting, not to mention the ten or twelve I had in my backpack. My exercise was eventually brought to a halt when the speakers dinged aloud, letting me know that I had arrived at my destination.

Thankfully, when the doors finally slid open in front of me, I wasn't pelted with the hail of lead and electricity that my subconscious half-expected. I smirked, striding confidently out into the hallway that was crammed full of every booby trap that Artec's most sadistic engineers could think up. I was met with nothing but sweet silence. I'd disabled all of their sensors, so even though the guns were locked and loaded, and every trip wire was rigged to send special operatives diving through the windows, they were all totally blind, thanks to a bit of clever code.

I wandered the halls for a few more minutes, until I finally found the room that I'd been waiting patiently for all this time. The room that Fara was paying me an exorbitant amount of money to loot. The room that Artec had gone through all this trouble to protect. I grinned, cracking my knuckles and tucking a few locks of hair back behind my ear. Time to really have fun. I stared up at the plaque on the door as I fished around in my pack for the tool I needed to break in.

 _ARCHIVES_

So often, archives were just dumpsters for garbage data that either nobody used, or meant absolutely nothing. Every once in awhile though, if you were lucky enough, you could find a diamond in the rough. Credit card numbers, government ID's, maybe galactic coordinates of secure shipments. But this room held something much more valuable than any of that. I didn't know what it was, and quite frankly, I didn't care. What I did care about was the fact that it would net me enough credits to fill a swimming pool.

After a moment of searching, my hand closed around a molded plastic grip. I yanked it out from my pile of tools, bringing my handheld blowtorch into view. I flicked a switch on the back a few times, sending a shower of sparks tumbling to the floor with each sharp snap of metal on metal. On the third crack, a loud hiss snaked from the end of the torch, quickly followed by a leaping orange and blue flare. The flame shrank after a moment, settling down into a stable, hushed whisper of heat and fire. I chuckled a little. This was one of my favorite tricks.

I brought the flame up to the handle of the door, slowly panning it back and forth, distributing heat evenly across the metal. The handle was dull grey at first, but before long, the metal began to glow dull red. I bit my lip, estimating the timing in my head, feeling out the correct spot on the wall with my free hand, and… With one sharp, fast motion, I brought my fist down, directly over where the mag-locks for the door were stored. Instantly, a hidden light on the door handle flashed bright red. A mechanical _clunk_ sounded inside the wall beneath my hand, and then the door popped open, swinging wide on its hinges. I flicked the blowtorch off, stowing it back in my bag.

Magnetic locks were great in most cases, but they had one glaring flaw. If they overheated, the magnets could fuse with the surrounding metal, permanently sealing the door shut. After a few reports of employees being trapped for hours by a fused mag-lock, Corerian safety standards had mandated that manufacturers build in some way to disengage the lock before catastrophic failure could occur. That meant the magnetic locks in these doors were designed to automatically open if they reached too hot a temperature. This wasn't normally an issue for large vaults where the magnets were hard to reach. In a small door like this however, with a little practice, it didn't take much to make the magnets reach dangerous temperatures. Combine that with a quick knock to the the control box in order to trip the pressure sensors, and it was open sesame. Normally the door would also now call for security, or possibly the fire department, but thankfully, I'd managed to disable the door's emergency calls earlier. Nothing was getting in or out of this floor. Except, hopefully, myself with treasure in hand.

I rose off my knees, brushing the dust off of my pants. I waltzed through the door, perfectly pleased with my clever self. Beyond the magnetic door was a small clean room, housing a few metal lockers, a crate with wires randomly overflowing from its lid, and what I actually needed: a few thin, plastic bodysuits, each with a bulky, black box attached to the back. I pulled one down of its hook, sizing it up to see if it would fit me. I nodded with satisfaction. It would do just fine.

I unbuttoned the blazer I was wearing, along with my blouse and dress pants, folding and stowing them away safely on one of the benches along the walls. I slipped on the bodysuit next, sliding both my arms and legs into the plastic, pulling the hood up over my head and zipping the whole thing up around me. I tested my mobility, bending down a few times and circling my arms at my sides. Satisfied with everything, I shouldered my pack, turning to the second, much thicker entrance set at the back of the room. The airlock. I took in a deep lungful of air, my breath fogging the clear plastic visor set in the front of my hood. I pulled the hatch open, feeling its heavy weight resist movement. The small airlock was dark when I stepped over the threshold, but a bright light clicked on as soon as I was inside.

Anybody with a laptop can tell you that computers get hot. All that electricity moving around, and things are bound to heat up pretty quickly. However, your store brand laptop has nothing on a corporate supercomputer. In the past, people had needed simple cold rooms to dissipate the heat that radiated off of more powerful processors. The better technology gets though, the more waste heat it produces. These days, top-of-the-line supercomputers could inflict third degree burns from more than ten meters away. A little air conditioning wasn't going to stop processors like that from melting themselves into an expensive lump of metal. The atmosphere inside newer cold rooms was pure helium gas, because at the temperatures that computers needed to be cooled, the oxygen and nitrogen in the air would liquify. The air was kept at a precise temperature of 5 degrees above absolute zero. Any lower than that, and the helium would start to condense as well. Any higher, and these supercomputers would burn themselves into sludge.

To put it in simpler terms, everything inside of a cold room is trying to kill you. If the cold doesn't turn you into a popsicle, then you'll suffocate with a very silly, high pitched voice due to the helium. Because of all that, technicians who needed to work in these cold rooms had to wear the special suits that I had just put on. They came with an insulating layer that trapped in heat almost perfectly, keeping its wearer from freezing. They also came with a rebreather to recycle oxygen back into the user's suit. I rolled my shoulders, cracking my neck. They also let you keep relatively good mobility, and they could double in a pinch as a sexy vinyl catsuit if the need arose. That had been a fun night with birdie…

I blinked, bringing myself back to my senses. Now wasn't the time to think about that. Now was the time to kick ass, and get my paycheck. I pressed the blinking button indented in the wall, sealing the two airlock doors in front of and behind me. Gas hissed as it vented into the room, fans whirred inside my suit, and after a moment, the oxygen levels in the room dropped, replaced instead with the super-chilled helium from the server room. Heat was drained from the room, dropping from room temperature steadily down until leveling out only a few degrees away from absolute zero. My suit cracked and constricted against my skin as it weathered the violent temperature drop, but thankfully it held tight even after the system had stabilized.

A loud tone buzzed over the speakers, and with a loud click, the airlock in front of me unlatched. It swung free on its hinges, revealing the expansive server room behind it. I whistled as I stepped out of the airlock. This place was almost as impressive as some of my highest end server rooms. Almost.

The room was the same pearlescent white as the security floor's server room, and the same tile stretched underfoot for yards and yards. I raised one hand up reflexively to block the harsh glare of the light reflecting off their smooth surfaces. Long rows of servers wove across the room, each one about as tall as I was, a mess of blinking lights and twisted cables all locked behind a metallic glass case. There were hundreds of them stretching out as far the eye could see. I let out a short huff of air, my breath again fogging the front of my hood as I shouldered my pack and started pacing through the servers one by one. Even with the thermal suit on, my skin still crawled at the sudden whisks of heat that brushed over the surface of my suit when I stepped too close to one of the racks.

Eventually, I dug up the one server that wasn't going to chargrill my pretty pink fur: the access terminal. I set my pack down in front of it, sizing the rig up momentarily. It was standard fare. There was an embedded keyboard with a simple operating system, displaying a console that would let me query commands to the rest of the system. Next to the monitor was a glittering silver port, useful for running external programs or saved queries off a hard drive. I stepped up to the keyboard, pulling it out of the case and waking the system up. The screen flashed once before displaying a simple black screen with white text, and a blinking input bar awaiting my command. I typed in a few keystrokes, my ear flicking in annoyance when the suit's gloves accidentally made me enter a few letters incorrectly. Eventually I acclimated to the awkward impediment however, and managed to type out a simple _help -version_ query into the console. I smiled at the computer's response.

 _AR-QUERY v.1.5.34_

This was good news. The Ar-Query software was a popular choice for interfacing with powerful databases because of how agile it was. It was one of the few programs available that had been specially designed to operate with supercomputers of this scale. Version 34 of the software had been used almost everywhere, and version 35 had only been released within the last couple weeks. There weren't many huge changes in it, but one thing that had been patched was a teensy bug related to network address checking. A teensy bug that I was going to use to bring this system to its knees.

I fished around in my backpack, shuffling through various odds and ends until my fingers closed around a small, unassuming piece of plastic buried at the very bottom. I pulled it out of the bag, holding it up in front of me and admiring its simple, sleek design. It was a jet black flash drive, with a muted pink stripe painted around the top, and a calligraphic _M_ swirling around the body. I turned it over in my hand, my smile growing at the simple word engraved in it. _BOMB._

I snapped it into the terminal's port, watching it think for a second before displaying the drive's single item on the side of the screen, a program that would arm and detonate the bomb. It wasn't any old explosive, however. No, this was more sophisticated. With a snicker, I opened the unassuming program, and hit run.

The entire system froze.

It's kind of hard to wrap your head around just how difficult it is to make a supercomputer crash. These systems are designed to be bulletproof, and devising a program powerful enough to overwhelm them is a daunting task. Often, a program that would reduce a lesser computer to a twitching mess could be gobbled up by these machines without breaking a sweat. There's always something to be said for returning to basics however, and that's exactly what exploiting this particular glitch did. Pride swelled in my chest as the supercomputer stuttered and jerked more and more, putting up a fight against my infection to the bitter end.

This particular exploit was based on one of the first viruses I'd ever built, when I was still learning with the Hot Rodders. My mentor back then had showed me how to overwhelm a computer with an exponential bomb like the one I was using now. They worked by inserting an innocuous command into the computer, but at some point while it was running, it would call the same command two more times. Then those two commands would each call two more commands, and two more commands, and so on. The number of active commands would double at every step, until the rig ran out of available memory and collapsed under the sheer weight. Ar-Query had a subroutine that checked for endless recursive behavior like this, and usually managed to put a stop to it before it could get out of hand. However, that one little bug in version 34 of the software didn't properly apply this bounds checking to network addresses. If you fed in an address that then linked to two other addresses, and then two more addresses, you could bring the whole system to its knees, tied up in an ever expanding rope of intersecting and recursive networking.

A few seconds after I lit the bomb's fuse, it detonated.

The high pitched whirr of the machine spun down into a feeble groan as its failsafe cut power to the rig. The screen popped, and soon, it was only black. I rocked back on my heels, my tail flicking inside the suit with glee. The supercomputer rebooted into an administrative, troubleshooting mode, and by the time I pulled out my laptop, it greeted me with its default message, pleading for help.

 _FATAL SYSTEM CRASH_

 _REBOOTING IN DEBUG MODE…_

 _AR-QUERY INITIALIZING..._

 _EXTERNAL DRIVES RECONFIGURING…_

 _PLEASE CONNECT DIAGNOSTIC MACHINE_

That last line was my queue. I flipped open the lid of my laptop, sliding a cable into the side of my computer with deft fingers. I attached the other end to supercomputer's shiny silver port, establishing my laptop as the "diagnostic machine" that would, ostensibly, help figure out what had gone wrong with Artec's archives. Of course, that was little more than a ruse. In reality, my laptop would hijack the entire system through this admin connection. Once that was set up, it would just be a simple matter of finding Fara's data, downloading it, and walking right back out into the sunny Cornerian day. Easy like Sunday morning, right?

Artec's computer accepted my fake connection without a second thought, trusting the front I was presenting as an official Artec representative. The rig went through a few more steps in the recovery process, but before too long, I was presented with the treasure map I'd been searching for. Artec's mainframe offered me a list of every server in the room, each one clearly labeled and diagrammed for my convenience. I couldn't help but let out a relieved chuckle, my fingers clenching in delight. I had done it. I was here. I had made it past all the obstacles. I had gone head-to-head with the best that Artec could throw at me, and I had won. I clicked on the first server in the top left of my screen, and quickly scanned over the list of the machine's contents. Nothing interesting there, mostly just subprocesses to help route the company's messages around the system, but I knew that it was only a matter of time now.

The next machine was a bit more interesting. I found a database full of what appeared to be liabilities for the firm, but not in the typical sense of owing money to a few government agencies. It was a compiled list of corners the company had cut during the construction of various warships for the Cornerian army, the likelihood of them being discovered, and contingency plans for how to shift blame in case they were discovered. I noted some of the more tantalizing entries in the table, but then closed it and resumed my search for the real golden goose. I'd seen enough corruption in my time as a hacker. It'd take more than that to get my attention.

I sat on the floor searching through Artec's archives, finding plenty of juicy tidbits, but the data I wanted remained elusive and out of reach. My nose wrinkled in distaste. Where could it be? Was I missing something? Was I just getting unlucky? I was keenly aware that, every second I spent searching was another second that I could be uncovered by a random search. I fidgeted my legs unhappily underneath me as yet another server turned up nothing more than some potential blackmail material. A pit was growing in my stomach, and I had learned that going with my gut usually kept me alive in this business. I decided to ignore it, however. I was so close to the finish line. I swallowed the bile in my throat and pressed on, despite my internal clamoring.

That was a mistake.

I double clicked on the next server, hovering my mouse over it before letting my gloved finger press my laptop's track pad. Usually, a small scrollable list would pop up on my screen once I'd done that, but this time, nothing happened. The corner of my mouth twitched downwards. I repeated my input again, thinking maybe I had simply misclicked. But again, the system was unresponsive. My brow furrowed, the butterflies in my stomach slowly starting to churn with paranoia. I clicked over into another application that was running in the background, but that one was clicking along just fine. So it wasn't my computer that was acting up. It was the connection itself.

I opened up my connections manager, just to make sure that nothing out of the ordinary was connected to my computer. I saw the connection to my orbital servers, the connection into Artec's network, and the connection over the cable into Artec's supercomptuer. However, there was another bridge there that I didn't understand, one pointing back to one of my resource servers that was housed under a foot of Fichinan snow. I wasn't using that server right now… So why was it connected to my rig?

It was then that one of my ears flicked inside my suit. It was just a subtle noise, a slight distortion in the usual grind of the circulatory fans that moved helium around the room. I had spent a lot of time in supercomputer cold rooms though, where even the slightest malfunction could result in catastrophic failure. I instinctively swiveled around, searching for the source of the noise.

That was when my heart slammed to a halt.

I barely had time to throw my body around the corner of the server array when a tidal wave of fiery heat blasted down the hall I'd just been sitting in. I hit the floor with a grunt, scrambling up onto my feet and backing away from the lethal blaze that had just scoured the hallway clean. The servers that had previously surrounded me had been reduced to a slurry of dull, glowing metal. Blue sparks cracked and hissed and arced across the space. My breath came in rapid, horrified pants. If I had waited just a second longer to spring to my feet, I would've been incinerated right where I stood, reduced to ashes by the overwhelming conflagration that had just screamed past.

Even while I was still physically reeling from the close call, my brain already knew exactly what had happened. My eyes whipped around to the end of my new hallway, and sure enough, I caught a glimpse of the machinery responsible. The circulator was green all the way across the board… Except for the one glaring red dot in front of the now-melted array. Somehow, the ventilation for that row had switched off, and in a cascade of sudden failure, a front of waste heat that was easily several thousand degrees hot had vaporized everything in its path.

My head snapped behind me when I heard the same faint, distorted sound as before, a low whine and a deep rumbling. But this time, I was ready. My legs sprang out from underneath me as I leapt down another hallway. Over my shoulder, a second barrage of cleansing fire tore down directly where I had just been standing. I pulled myself into a fast roll when I hit the ground, but this time, I didn't stop to stare. The instant I was on my feet again, I put my head down and sprinted for the end of the row. My feet crashed against the tile underfoot. My breath was fast in my ears, but that didn't inhibit me from hearing another groan of combustion behind me. I gritted my teeth, just barely slipping around the next corner before the wave of superheated air slammed past me. It scorched the hallway and sent a wash of searing heat over me, even managing to pierce the nearly perfect insulation of my suit. I raised one arm to block the rush from hitting my face, but I still felt the pinpricks of intense heat scrape over my fur and skin. I was breathing quickly, but my legs were still bent, and my ears were still peeled for the next attack from any direction.

However, the next sound I heard wasn't another machinery failure. It was the sound of static hissing over a PA, followed by a screechy voice that made my eyes go wide with recognition. My fists clenched when she spoke, as all the pieces began to fall into place.

"Nowhere left to run, Katt!" the voice spat at me, not bothering to hide the seething hatred in her voice. A stream of curses left my lips, but my body was on autopilot, even as my brain was now absorbed in anguish at the female voice in the speaker system. My laptop had been liquified in that first blast, so instead, my hand undid the strap that was holding my phone in place on my pack. I brought it out and quickly punched in the code to unlock it, holding it at the ready in my off hand. I dumped the rest of the bag at my feet. Its contents were only going to slow me down now.

"I'm going to burn you to a crisp, and I'm going to _enjoy it_ ," the voice said once more, her words dripping with sadism. I knew exactly who this was. I also knew I had walked right into her trap. The sick bastard on the other end of that speaker was a hacker who went by the name _Retr0_ , but her real name was Haley. A long, long time ago… well, let's just say we got off to a bad start. Some people hired me to build them a new tool, and that instrument had caused one of Haley's friends to die. She'd loathed me ever since then, and her incessant pestering didn't make me like her much more. Artec must've hired her onto their security team, because even if she wasn't as good as me, she was a relatively close second. I should've realized that she was the hacker I was facing down in the lobby. Only Haley could've known my system that well. Now, I was sealed in a room where everything both wanted to and was capable of ending me. Including the system admin.

"Killed by a computer," Haley growled, her voice crackled over the speakers. Behind me, I heard a mechanical pop in one of the servers, but it didn't resemble the sound made before a wave of heat. I whirled around, bringing myself face to face with an otherwise innocuous computer. "That seems like a pretty ironic death to me," she finished. I backpedaled a few quick steps away from the server that had just let out the alarming noise, but I wasn't quick enough. A piercing _bang_ drilled into my ears, and with a flash of electricity, the server overloaded, letting out a sizeable shockwave in the process. The blast knocked me off balance, throwing me backwards until my head slammed against the metal corner of another server. Stars danced in my vision, and I couldn't help but let out a short cry at the piercing pain. A hand ran to the back of my head, but through the gloves and my hood, it couldn't do much to abate the pounding in my skull.

I blinked a few times, my eyes slowly refocusing on the scene in front of me. My head swam, and my thoughts tied themselves in knots. However, lucidity returned, accompanied the rush of adrenaline that spiked in my veins when that familiar, chilling whine sounded to my right. I stumbled in the only direction I could without getting barbequed, and felt another singeing rush of heat as the ventilation gave out beside me. The prickling pain of the temperature cleared my thoughts, and when I glanced around myself, I realized what Haley's play was. She had me cornered on all side by sparking, superheated metallic sludge, and now, all she had to do was pull the pin on my escape route to finish me for good.

I put my head down and booked it as quickly down the row as I could. My heart thundered in my chest, and the nerves up and down my spine were singing with tension. Dead ahead of me, I saw the circulator sputter and then die as Haley went for the killing blow. I gritted my teeth, doubling down on my sprint, but I knew it wasn't going to be enough. The atmosphere in the distance was already rippling and distorting with heat waves, and the column of torrid air was already almost on top of me. I wasn't going to make it in time.

I skidded to a halt, my lips pressed in a determined, thin line. My legs bent at the knees, and I positioned myself up on my toes, ready to pounce. The heat wave was bearing down on me now. And if I couldn't make through the front exit in time, then the only out… was up. With one fluid motion, I sprang off the floor, quickly hooking a leg around the top of one of the servers I was standing next to. The searing metal burned my hands and legs wherever they came in contact with each other, but thankfully, the suit could prevent burns as long as I didn't touch the rig for too long. I hauled myself over the brink, biting my tongue through the pain in my extremities, letting out a short breath of relief when the wall of boiling air slammed past, just a few inches underneath me. I landed gracefully on my feet in the next row over, already rushing for the next aisle.

As I ran, arms and legs pounding in unison, a furious growl erupted over the speakers. I made it to the next intersection just in time to hop out of the way of another barrage, and Haley's voice followed soon after. "Why can't you ever make things easy? I'll burn down this entire damn building if I have to!" she screamed, her voice charged with fury. "You can't run forever! And the minute you slip up, I'll make sure you _rot_." I hated to say it, but she was right. My breathing came in heavier, faster pants now, and I could feel my strength diminishing with every leap, every close call just a little more razor-thin than the last. The rebreather on this suit wasn't designed to recycle oxygen as quickly as I was using it up. It was meant for a person sitting perfectly still at a computer, not a person sprinting for their life. I was using my air faster than I could regenerate it. Which meant that if Haley didn't fry me, I'd poison my own atmosphere with carbon dioxide until I suffocated.

Either way, I was looking kind of screwed.

I ducked into another hall of servers to dodge Haley's next ventilation failure. My muscles were starting to spasm and lock up. My vision was going dark at the edges. Haley was forcing me deeper and deeper into her maze of computers, and I was running out of real estate in my retreat. And I still didn't know how I was going to get out of this one. Haley's shouting grew harsher and louder the further our chase went on, her attacks coming faster and faster until I could barely keep up. And that was when it happened.

Another whine came from behind me as I limped down the one of the last hallways that was still intact. I could barely hear it through the ringing in my ears. I couldn't even muster up the coherence to let out a strained groan as I forced myself towards the safety of the corner. Just one more step, I told myself. Just one more step. And as soon as I had planted that last step around the corner… my legs gave out underneath me. I barely felt it when I hit the ground. Colors and the impending darkness of unconsciousness swirled in my vision. My breath was shallow. But the battering ram of heat was still approaching. I didn't manage to crawl out of the way in time.

A ripping, piercing dagger slashed through the fog of my mind when the column of air blasted past me, glancing across an exposed section of my back. I've never felt such visceral pain in my life. I let out a blood curdling scream as the heat ripped up skin and flesh on my vulnerable side, searing and charring it with indiscretion. The suit didn't tear under the heat, but the plastic shell melted into my fur, becoming a bubbling layer fused to my bare, burned skin. The pain consumed my entire mind, tears squeezing out of my clenched eyes as I tried to beat back the waves of nausea and agony. I curled into a tight ball on the floor.

Through the excruciating torment, I could still hear Haley's voice over the speakers, smug with victory. "I've finally caught you," she started, her words shredding into my ears. "After all these years chasing you, I've got you right where I want you: whimpering, crying, and begging for mercy. You're going to die like this. Too pathetic to even fight back." She spat every words with venom. My brain was screaming at me to get up, to fight back against the pain tooth and nail, not to give up. I tried to get my arm underneath me, but even that small motion sent a rending pain down my side. In the distance, through the darkness of my vision, I saw birdie of all people, his beak contorted as he yelled at me to get on my feet. I tried again, for him, but even still, I couldn't stifle a tortured cry at every maneuver. The pain was unbearable.

"I looked up to you, once," Haley continued. It seemed like it was miles away as lucidity ebbed from my mind, but I still heard the distinctive groan of Haley tampering with the ventilation system at the end of the row. My seconds were numbered. "When you and I were just starting out, I thought you were the coolest person alive. I didn't know that my idol was a monster back then. I'm smarter now. I realized that you were only ever interested in yourself. You didn't care who you had to hurt in order to get your way. I'm putting an end to that, right here, right now." With a burst of effort, and an agonizing scream, I managed to push myself up onto one hand, my back and arms shaking wildly with exertion. I snarled against the looming darkness, clawing at it, tearing at it. But every time I thought I'd beaten it, the wound on my back reasserted itself, crushing my feeble resistance. This would be my last chance. Up on one shaking arm already, I tried to move my second out for extra support. It slid haltingly underneath me, dragging across the floor as every twitch of my back muscles sent fresh convulsions raking up my spine.

But just when I had my second arm in place, I gave out.

My chest and skull hit the ground with a thud. I didn't move. I didn't twitch. I was beaten. Haley sighed over the speaker, eventually speaking with disdain. "You're a disgrace. You can't even face your own death with dignity." The whine grew louder as she prepared to cut the line. "This is for what you did to Ruby, bitch." I closed my eyes, awaiting my fate. The whine grew louder and louder in my ears. And then, finally, Haley hit the kill switch. I relaxed my form, ready for the end.

...But nothing happened.

Haley hit the switch once more. But again, the ventilation continued. I could hear her tap it frantically a few more times, each time more loudly than the last. "No, no, no, no…" she muttered to herself as she checked her system. And that was when she gasped. "No! No!" she screamed. Her words were fearful, and furious. Haley glanced at her camera feed, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw something that she had missed before. A small, lopsided grin on my face.

"What did you do?!" she shrieked over the system. I saw a green light glow on a different security camera, showing Haley had changed her feed to a different angle. That was when she let out a long, enraged cry. In my off hand, hidden by my curled up body, was my phone. My grin grew wider as, shakily, I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, eventually bringing myself into a sitting position. The pain was still brutal in my side, but I fought through it. I brought myself to my feet, having to hold onto a safety rail for balance, even as Haley continued to scream expletives over the PA. There was nothing she could do about it though.

Haley was good, but she'd gotten sloppy. Of all the things that had brought her down, it was her connection to the speaker system that hadn't been properly secured. I'd managed to use that to track her back to her home setup, and had even found a login and password improperly stored on the announcement network. From there, I'd just had to lock her out of her system, changing enough passwords and authentication codes that she wasn't going to be able to unlock her computer any time soon.

In other words, I'd just trounced this wannabe, even when she had me on the ropes.

Haley continued to yell in frustration as she watched me pick up a pair of bolt cutter from a tool station nearby, and walk towards an innocuous drive bank nearby, powerless to stop me. I'd realized a while back this was the one row that Haley had been avoiding melting, probably to try and save whatever was in it. I'd also realized that, for some reason, I hadn't found Fara's file on any server connected to the network. Put those two things together, and I'd deduced that Fara's data was probably stored in an offline storage rack in this aisle. Sure enough, when I cut the lock off of the locker, I found a single data sphere inside. Once I connected my phone to it, I found exactly what I'd come here looking for.

Haley was practically howling in pure hatred as I unceremoniously ripped the data sphere from its dock. It felt heavy in my fingers, and I couldn't help but grin when I saw my distinctive, calligraphic _M_ imprinted on the back of the sphere. I held it up to the nearest camera, looking Haley straight in the eye.

"Maybe I do look out for myself. But you know what?" I announced, loudly enough to make sure she was hearing every word of what I had to say to her. "I do it so much better than you'll ever be able to. Katt Monroe is, and always will be, the best." 

/

Epilogue | RoomService()

Fara groaned at the sound of her phone ringing on her bedside table. She took a pillow and tried to cover her rather large ears with it, but with her sensitive hearing, it did little to block out the soul-crushingly annoying chime of her phone.

Next to the fennec, her husband Bonny stirred, letting out a rather undignified grunt for the high standard he usually held his conduct to. It was hard to blame him though. This was the fifth night this week that her phone had woken the both of them up in the middle of the night. And she had a feeling she knew exactly what she was going to hear at the end of line when she picked up.

"Sorry Bonny," she mumbled, getting a groan of sympathy from the fox. "I swear, if this is about who I think it is, I'm going to fly out to Meteo personally and kill her." Fara fumbled for the communicator next to her, having to flip on a lamp and put on her reading glasses to see where she was reaching. Fara didn't pick up her usual silver, wireless communicator however. No, her very official, very daunting looking red, corded phone was ringing. That line was saved for official Phoenix Corp emergencies, like a major ship collision, or wartime conditions at a mining plant… or an executive data breach.

Fara rubbed her eyes as she picked up the phone. "What?" she asked, no small amount of hostility in her voice. She could tell the person at the other end of the line was trembling, his nerves shot.

"S-Sorry to bother you, ma'am, but… There's been another p-password crack," he jumbled out, eventually managing to get out a full sentence. "A hacker managed to break in and s-steal your p-passcode."

Fara let out a long, harsh sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingertips. Bonny stirred again at the noise, and she comforted him back to sleep with her other hand. "Was it Katt again?"

"We believe so, yes," he stammered. "Should we launch an investigation and press charges?"

Fara let out a loud, unabashed pissed off growl. "How? How the hell can she know?!" she yelled, hearing a frightened yip from the other end of the line. This was Katt's way of getting back at her for the mission, she knew that, but right now, she wanted to get her hands around that feline's throat and finish the job Haley had started. "Of course we shouldn't," she said sharply. Not only was Fara sure that Katt hadn't left a trace, but she was also sure that Katt would release all manner of blackmail she'd found if Phoenix Corp tried anything like it. She loved Katt for how crafty she was. But she also hated her for it.

"Fine, whatever, just change the code and send it to me in the morning." Fara was about to hang up, but the employee's voice came once more over the phone, hurriedly.

"A-Actually, there's one more thing… Um..." he said, hesitating. Fara lett out a short huff, impatient.

"Well? Out with it!" she barked.

"W-Well, the hacker, she um… she appears to have purchased a vacation for herself using your corporate account."

Fara was silent on her end of the phone for a long minute. Eventually, she spoke into the receiver again, her voice a whisper, flat and level. "For how long, and how much?"

The employee gulped. "About five weeks, and... about half a million credits."

Bonny, along with the rest of the apartment building, shot up in bed in a heart-stopping panic at the infamous, ear-piercing scream that Fara Phoenix loosed that night.

/

A/N: Look at that! I actually finally managed to finish a multi-chapter story! I'm just as surprised as you are, I didn't think it was possible. And yet, here it is! I hope you guys liked it, because I had a lot of fun writing it. Katt is a great character, and more people should use her in new and interesting roles! And don't fret if you like Hacker Katt and want more of her, she'll be back before you know it in Brace for Impact! Speaking of, this is canonical to Brace for Impact's universe, so see if you can find any interesting hints for over in that story… :)

Anyway, thanks a million to Furfur for helping me every step along the way with this. He stood by me from the very beginning of this all the way to the very end of it. Thanks buddy, I never would've been able to do this without you! Also, Bonny is totally his character, and you should go read his stuff, because Fara and Bonny are absolutely wonderful together in his writing.

That about wraps it up! Hope you guys liked it, and hopefully I'll have something else out for you guys soon. Happy holidays!


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